Like a lot of African Americans, I've long wondered what the deal was
with Condoleezza Rice and the issue of race. How does she work so
loyally for George W. Bush, whose approval rating among blacks was
measured in a recent poll at a negligible 2 percent? How did she come to
a worldview so radically different from that of most black Americans? Is
she blind, is she in denial, is she confused -- or what?

After spending three days with the secretary of state and her entourage
as she toured Birmingham, where she grew up in a protective bubble as
the tumult of the civil rights movement swirled around her, I have a
partial answer: It's as if Rice is still cosseted in her beloved
Titusville, the neighborhood of black strivers where she was raised,
able to see the very different reality that other African Americans
experience but not to reach out of the bubble -- not able to touch that
other reality, and thus not able to really understand it.

Rice's parents tried their best to shelter their only daughter from Jim
Crow racism, and they succeeded. Forty years later, Rice shows no
bitterness when she recalls her childhood in a town whose streets were
ruled by the segregationist police chief Bull Connor. "I've always said
about Birmingham that because race was everything, race was nothing,"
she said in an interview on the flight home.

When she reminisces, she talks of piano lessons and her brief attempt
at ballet -- not of Connor setting his dogs loose on brave men, women
and children marching for freedom, which is the Birmingham that other
residents I met still remember. A friend of Rice's, Denise McNair, was
one of the four girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church. That would have left a deep scar on me, but Rice can
speak of that atrocity without visible emotion.

She doesn't deny that race makes a difference. "We all look forward to
the day when this country is race-blind, but it isn't yet," she told
reporters in Birmingham. Later she added, "The fact that our society is
not colorblind is a statement of fact."

But then why are the top echelons of her State Department almost
entirely white? "That's an artifact of foreign policy," she said in the
interview. "It's not been a very diverse profession." In other words,
there aren't enough qualified minority candidates. I wondered how many
times those words have been used as a lame excuse.

One of the things she somehow missed was that in Titusville and other
black middle-class enclaves, a guiding principle was that as you
climbed, you were obliged to reach back and bring others along. Rice has
been a foreign policy heavyweight for nearly two decades; she spent four
years in the White House as the president's national security adviser.
In the interview, she mentioned just one black professional she has
brought with her from the National Security Council to State.

As we were flying to Alabama, Rice said an interesting thing. She was
talking about the history of the civil rights movement, and she said,
"If you read Frederick Douglass, he was not petitioning from outside of
the institutions but rather demanding that the institutions live up to
what they said they were. If you read Martin Luther King, he was not
petitioning from outside, he was petitioning from inside the principles
and the institutions, and challenging America to be what America said
that it was."

The civil rights movement came from the inside? I always thought the
Edmund Pettus Bridge was outside.

I know very few black Americans who think of themselves fully as
insiders in this society. No matter how high we rise, there's always
that reality that Rice acknowledges: The society isn't colorblind, not
yet. It's not always in the front of your mind, but it's there. We talk
about it, we overcome it, but it's there.

When Rice was growing up, her father stood guard at the entrance of her
neighborhood with a rifle to keep the Klan's nightriders away. But that
was outside the bubble. Inside the bubble, Rice was sitting at the piano
in pretty dresses to play Bach fugues. It sounds like a wonderful
childhood, but one that left her able to see the impact that race has in
America -- able to examine it and analyze it -- but not to feel it.

If there's a "Rosebud" to decode the enigma that is Condoleezza Rice,
it's Titusville.